The Reformation – for all the scorn with which its partisans had dismissed the ideal of chastity as monkish superstition – had served, if anything, to place an even greater premium on the sacral quality of marriage. As the Church was to Christ, so a woman was to her husband. The man who treated his wife brutally, forcing himself on her, paying no attention to her pleasure, treating her as he might a prostitute, dishonoured God. Mutual respect was all. Sex between a married couple should be ‘an holy kind of rejoicing and solacing themselves’.
